


Two Winters

by brigitttt



Series: Slow Waters [2]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Accurate Depictions of Real Cities (i hope), Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Explicit Sexual Content, Getting Together, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, The Drift (Pacific Rim), working through issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 09:41:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30103992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigitttt/pseuds/brigitttt
Summary: As much as Obi-Wan would like to fairytale an ending for after their defeat of the Kaiju, he is still the owner of a house in Alaska, a not insubstantial amount of baggage, and a lingering drift connection.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Series: Slow Waters [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2215122
Comments: 20
Kudos: 99





	Two Winters

**Author's Note:**

> The fated epilogue to the Pacific Rim AU. Thank you for patience! Please enjoy! <3  
> Probably not completely necessary to have read the first part before this, but like..,, why wouldn't you

_**November** _

Obi-Wan arrives in Anchorage early in the month, taking a cheap red-eye flight from Tokyo, or as much as a 15-hour flight can count as a red-eye when it takes two entire days to get there. It’s actually hard to tell what day it really is, what with time zones and the international date line, but it’s some sort of morning as a cab takes him to his house.

The timing of his leaving the Shatterdome behind – and Anakin with it, entangled as he currently is with Padmé and her new fellowship position in Osaka – means that he is welcomed back to Anchorage with a sudden plummet in temperature. Nothing surprising, but it means that even the cold weather clothing he stuffed in his carry-on isn’t quite enough. As soon as he gets a taxi he tries to remember whether the big winter coats are kept in the hall closet or in the basement storage with the other camping gear.

He overpays the cab driver, heaves his single military-size duffle up the front steps and tiredly welcomes himself back to an empty, dusty house. The lights miraculously turn on when he recalls where the switch is, and illuminate all the mediocrity of the soft grey couch, the wood panelled walls, the off-white tile that leads into the kitchen.

The duffle and his backpack get unceremoniously dumped in the hall, and in the stupor of the truly sleep-deprived, Obi-Wan stands at the liminal junction of the living room and the ground floor hallway for a full two minutes, his brain slowly trying to decide between getting tea, figuring out the house’s heating, and assessing the current status of bedlinens. Tea wins out.

His relatively quick promotion and appointment to the Tokyo Dome meant that he hadn’t bothered to pack up much stuff in the Anchorage house. Thankfully, Qui-Gon had pretty much fully paid it off already, so as long as he sent enough of his Defense Corps. pay back to make sure a pipe didn’t burst, Obi-Wan was somewhat free to leave his inheritance all alone for, well, about five and a half years, apparently. He should’ve covered more of the furniture with dust sheets, but hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that.

The good tea is in his luggage, of course, but there’s some decent stuff still in the cupboard, if he ignores the use-by date. How bad can dried leaves really get in five years, he thinks, until he takes his first steeped, musty sip and grimaces around the mouthful. He only wanted it for the warmth, anyway, so he wraps his hands around the mug and goes to see whether the thermostat still works. While he’s down in the basement warily eyeing the hot water heater while it clanks away, he does find the big winter coats, puffy and stuffed with down and lined with wool flannel, next to the sleeping bags and camp tents. The first one is much too big but the second has a much more reasonable sleeve length. After a moment of deliberation, and an idle sip of tea that he’d forgotten he shouldn’t drink, he takes both coats up with him, slung over his shoulder.

The coats get tossed over the back of the couch before he trudges up the stairs, thin carpet giving way to chilly hardwood. A couple framed pictures climb up the wall to his left, but he doesn’t really feel like giving them more than a cursory glance as he passes. His eyes skate over the first bedroom door – _not_ out of self-preservation, what old knickknacks does he need to protect himself from – and he opens the linen closet, airing cupboard, whichever name they give it in this country, he’s too jetlagged to know. Sheets and duvet cover and a knitted quilt for good measure, Obi-Wan comes to the second bedroom.

His old room—just _his_ room, really, is not much more than he remembers it being. By the end of his work in Anchorage he’d basically moved fully into the barracks at the Dome, Qui-Gon having done so well before him so as to be properly on-call for an attack. In the time between emigrating from England and living full time at the Shatterdome, Obi-Wan hadn’t ever amassed a huge amount of possessions regardless, so there’s not many teenage embarrassments or anything ready to shame him from the bookshelves or bedside table. It’s sparse, and small, and as he makes the bed up he’s reminded of his first reaction to the space all those years ago, an apprehensive 17-year-old keen to follow his father, given a house with at least a hundred metres between it and their neighbours’, and a room with a window that looked out into the branches of a large fir tree, the snowy mountains just visible beyond. He’d been tired from travelling, same as now, but buoyed with wonder at the new landscape. Grateful that he could spend so much more time with Qui-Gon.

Now he’s grateful that he has a clean bed to fall into, and so he does just that, pulling his phone out from a jacket pocket and thumbing open his contacts. Anakin had made him promise to message as soon as he’d landed safely, but Obi-Wan doesn’t think he’d be too upset that an hour or so has gone by since the plane touched down.

He hesitates over Cody’s name in his phone. He and his brothers had returned to New Zealand amid the general fanfare of Pan-Pacific celebration, wistfully leaving Tai Mate behind in Tokyo as a kind of gift or donation of recent historical importance. Alaska is 22 hours behind New Zealand, or 2 hours “ahead” depending on how you look at it, so it’s not like he’s going to wake Cody up in the middle of the night with a notification. Obi-Wan presses his name, opens the keyboard.

It’s also not like they parted ways on bad terms or anything, either, or ignored each other despite Cody’s invitation to visit. Obi-Wan just had to come back to Anchorage to sort out this house; now that he’s technically unemployed and the UN already gave the order to shut down the Shatterdomes for good he doesn’t exactly have many other places to go. And they simply let each other leave – with soft eyes and smiles, yes, but no further explicit statements. 

He stays on that empty message screen for so long that his phone screen dims and turns off, and for the first time in however many days it’s been since Cody left Tokyo, and then since Obi-Wan left Tokyo, he closes his eyes and feels for the drift connection at the back of his brain. The sparking ends of it are barely there, stifled with distance, and he finds himself grasping at where he thinks it still is only to have to reach a little further for it, like his foot is coming down harder than he means to on a step that isn’t there. Echoes, Obi-Wan reminds himself, and then thinks of aftershocks from an earthquake. Watching lightning flash in the distance and waiting for the rumble of thunder.

Sooner or later, he’ll take Cody up on his offer, and fly all the way down to New Zealand. For now, he wakes his phone, and types out a message.

***

Obi-Wan shivers, a little unexpectedly as he steps off the plane.

Early May on the South Island means it’s just in time for the weather to drop to something around what Obi-Wan remembers from most of the year in England; no big Alaskan winter coat necessary, but clearly he should’ve worn more than a jumper. Or maybe the shiver is just his own body adjusting to not being on a plane anymore. Or maybe it’s—

Cody is there, standing in the small crowd of arrivals in the Christchurch airport, and Obi-Wan’s eyes zero in on him like he’s the only person present. He lets loose a smile, can’t even try to contain it, and the drift in the back of his head – which he had not exactly been ignoring, but hadn’t been paying attention to as the miles counted down, either – starts to prickle and hum and propel him closer and closer. Cody opens one arm wide, and Obi-Wan lets himself be corralled inwards, and then they’re unbearably close, Obi-Wan’s cheeks starting to heat with the easy intimacy of it, only for it to end up in a hongi, his forehead and nose pressed firmly to Cody’s. Someone pats him on the back with a big hand, and he retreats from the embrace, Cody’s warm smile following him.

“Good to see you, sir,” Rex says brightly, deftly slinging Obi-Wan’s backpack off and onto his own shoulder.

“Just Obi-Wan,” he reminds him. Cody’s hand lingers at the back of his upper arm and he feels his blush creep further up his face.

“And this is Boba,” Cody introduces, swinging a hand at the sullen teen standing with arms crossed just to Rex’s side. “He begged to come along to pick you up.”

Boba squawks and grumbles that he _did not_ , while Cody laughs and picks up the single, large duffle Obi-Wan had dropped on the floor. Obi-Wan does not look at the way Cody’s arm and shoulder flex underneath the fabric of his jean jacket, slightly too tight. In the week that they’d met he had quickly gotten used to seeing them in Ranger gear, either the black undersuit sets or the gleaming white drivesuit armour. Nothing so civilian as a denim jacket and joggers.

Rex sits with Boba in the back seat as they drive through town, graciously giving Obi-Wan the passenger seat of honour while Cody drives. Obi-Wan doesn’t catch on until twenty minutes in when he’s starting to wonder how big the city really is, when he sees the houses dwindle into a sort of farmland, abruptly hidden when they get swallowed into a road tunnel. He turns from looking out the window to observe Cody, profile lit up in shifting light each time the car passes a tunnel light.

“I thought you said you lived in Christchurch,” he accuses, but there’s still general curiosity in his voice.

Cody’s mouth pulls to the side, as if he’s suddenly guilty for the half-lie, and says “Mum’s house is in Lyttelton. It’s a smaller coast town, just the other side of the Port Hills, but,” he huffs, “still in the _general vicinity_ of Christchurch.” Obi-Wan smiles cheekily at him until Cody flicks his gaze from the road briefly to see it, rolling his eyes like he might just pull over inside this tunnel and boot him out.

“Very well, then,” Obi-Wan says, settling back into his seat. Rex snickers faintly from the backseat.

They emerge from the tunnel into what amounts to the main town and then head back up the hill they just travelled through. The road gets narrower and narrower, and with so many trees in the way it’s hard to get a good look out at the water, but eventually Cody turns into a driveway, which turns into the general idea of a lot in front of a white, sort of one-and-a-half storey house. Boba clambers out of the backseat door the second Cody puts the car in park; Obi-Wan only smiles, remembers what it was like to be that age and pretty much embarrassed by everything.

Cody and Rex insist on carrying all his luggage for him, and while Rex brings the duffle bag inside, Cody takes his backpack and leads Obi-Wan around the grassy patch on the side to a sort of sloped, backyard equivalent. There’s a wondrous view of the harbour, though, and the rest of this hill as it rolls all the way down to the water, dotted with houses. The sun is out although it’s not terribly warm, and Obi-Wan takes deep breaths as they stand at the edge of the property, steady inhales that fill his lungs. A bird sings from some distant tree, and for the first time in six months the drift connection is all a pleasant sensation, like puzzle tiles fitting snugly together, a singing, living buzz. Cody is right next to him, but—Obi-Wan switches so that he’s on Cody’s right side, and that’s much better.

He can feel the way Cody smiles at him from only inches away without even having to turn his head to see, but why wouldn’t he want to? So Obi-Wan does, taking his fill of Cody’s dark-tanned cheeks, his handsome jaw, the twist of the scar on his temple, the way his lips stretch over his smile. Their hands brush together, either on accident or because they both had the thought to fill the same space, but whichever reason it was, their hands collide again on purpose.

***

_**December** _

The woman is older, hair decisively grey and of a stature that seems to announce it’s not what it once was. Obi-Wan does that polite expression at her, the one that always makes Anakin roll his eyes, and turns back to the grand selection of two different marmalades the city market has to offer, but he can still see out of the corner of his eye how she continues to peer at him. Maybe she thinks he’s a store clerk, or that the length of time he’s been taking to pick out a simple fruit spread means he has some especially salient wisdom to impart, and she wants to be first to hear it.

He almost makes himself laugh at that – how self-obsessed does he need to be, in a grocery store of all the ultimate liminal places – and just as he reaches for the jar he’s decided on, the woman pointedly clears her throat, an entreating little noise. Obi-Wan turns.

“Are you Qui-Gon’s son?” She says. It’s the most normal thing he could be asked and yet it surprises him more than anything else would have. He’s so thrown off that he’s nodding before he can think to respond in speech.

“Yes, I am—sorry, how do I know you? Or—”

She flaps a hand as if to waft away the very notion of decorum. “I worked at the Dome,” she explains, which, of course, that’s how she would know Qui-Gon, or recognize Obi-Wan in that capacity. Everyone knew the rangers, out of either fondness or necessity, and she explains as such right now, even. Obi-Wan nods along politely – “Just an old K-Science lab tech, but we all watched the missions on the live screens, made sure our boys came through,” – but he has an odd feeling that he’s not even really part of the conversation. He was just a LOCCENT officer quietly yet unsubtly accused of nepotism when he moved up the ranks to mission controller, and then of course he went off to Japan, abandoned Anchorage entirely. Never mind that the PPDC gave up on Anchorage altogether not six months after his last mission there.

She’s apparently fine carrying on with minimal input from Obi-Wan, now transitioned into condolences. “Such a shame to lose him that day, we all felt it,” she says, flickering a hand near his arm in a fleeting suggestion of sympathy. “And that young boy – only a couple years older than my own son! – getting hurt like that, just makes you think, really.”

“It does,” Obi-Wan says distractedly, glancing over her shoulder for some way out of this.

“Not much you can do after that,” she says with a sigh, then, “losing an arm, I mean,” she clarifies in a hush. As if it’s such a scandal for Anakin to have been injured, and for some reason this is what makes Obi-Wan finally openly frown at her.

“He’s done much more than you could ever conceive of,” he says, trying to summon all the stifled civility of a true British ex-pat. “If you’ll excuse me,” and he shifts away from her, back down the aisle, straight for the till to buy whatever he already has in his basket and get out of here.

He collapses in the car, hands on the wheel but parked, unmoving in the lot. He’s not even sure what he’s so caught up in; she’d been the normal amount of commiserating about Qui-Gon, and an unfortunate amount of rude about Anakin, and he’s irritated that she had the gall to do all that in a grocery store, just talk about a tragic event like his chest isn’t squeezing in, his throat isn’t tightening back—but it isn’t.

Obi-Wan grips the steering wheel, focussing in the back of his mind on the way his thumbs wrap around the curve of it, and realises that he’s actually. Fine. He’s annoyed and probably put off of this particular store forever now, but he doesn’t actually feel like he’s going to shatter just from thinking about his father. He glances out at the snow on the road, and sits in the chill of the car for a minute.

When he gets back to the house, he unloads the groceries that he managed to get – damn, no marmalade – and hovers at the bottom of the stairs, unsure whether going up to try to force some feeling back into that shape in his heart is really the best idea. Should he be happy he is no longer subject to that bone-deep sadness that used to overthrow him completely? Should he be pleased that the thought of Qui-Gon’s hand guiding him along the road, or of his voice rumbling through some statement of praise no longer sinks a hardened spur into his sternum?

He opens the door to Qui-Gon’s room and finds it as still and stuffy as he left it before Japan. Everything is in browns and creams, the wood panelled walls extending up here from the living room. His great-grandmother’s knitted quilt sits neatly folded on the end of the bed. Obi-Wan steps carefully over to the bookshelf, as if he still has to sneak around with a deep, looming feeling that he’s not supposed to be in here.

It takes him a moment to find what he’s looking for: two thick ring-binders nestled on the second shelf from the bottom. Obi-Wan has to move an ornamental elephant statue out of the way before pulling them out, but then he’s flipping open past the first laminated photo page, many young-faced, RAF-uniformed Qui-Gon’s staring up at him, sheet after sheet. Obi-Wan finds the moment where he arrives in pictures, a ridiculously small bundle of a thing in Qui-Gon’s arms. His mother has never been in these albums, and he’s never had the inclination to search for her, or find out whether he ‘ _really is_ ’ Qui-Gon’s or not. It has never mattered.

He doesn’t know if he’s looking for a particular picture, or if he’s just trying to find one single image that makes his eyes prickle with tears. Any one of them should be sufficient; this one of his father recently graduated from school, or this one in his early twenties, leaning up against a motorcycle that was likely not his own. Obi-Wan sifts through each image, not idle but not frantic, either, and just as he switches to the second binder, a loose picture slips to the floor.

Obi-Wan crouches to pick it up, and then stills. It is himself, except much younger, perhaps seven or thereabouts, with an awful school cap stuffed on his head. Seven-year-old Obi-Wan stands awkwardly in grey shortpants and socks, knobbly knees sticking out where he is poised at the front gate of their house back in Devon. He has a little frown against the sunlight, or maybe against the cap, and something leaps inside of his chest. He can imagine this happening even if he doesn’t remember it specifically, how Obi-Wan would’ve wanted to get this first day of school over with, how itchy his jumper must have been, how Qui-Gon would have stood behind the camera and told him to stop scowling, his face will get stuck like that. How that would’ve made Obi-Wan giggle into a better picture, but Qui-Gon kept this one anyway.

He debates leaving the albums on the floor as he leaves but quickly cleans them up and sets them back on the shelf, minus this one picture. He left his phone on the kitchen counter, so he props the photo up on the post that attempts to delineate some sort of breakfast bar between the kitchen and living room. Without thinking too much about it, he snaps a picture of it with his phone, and sends it to Cody.

It’s nearing midnight over there, Obi-Wan calculates in his head, but Cody replies quick enough, with a short message: _Now I see why you don’t wear hats_. Obi-Wan smiles goofily down at his phone, a little glad that he only lives with himself, and brushes across the diminished drift connection out of habit.

***

Obi-Wan wakes up slowly in the guest room of Cody’s family’s house, at almost a normal hour. The blankets have bundled up near his shoulders, falling over his mouth so that only the top of his head and his eyes are showing, but it’s comfortable, and he could very easily just close his eyes and fall asleep again. There are faint noises of birds from the direction of the window, and warm, breakfast smells emanating from the rest of the house, and Obi-Wan is sure he hasn’t felt so comfortable in maybe years. The pillow under his head is so soft that his head sinks into it with each breath, and he realizes he may not have moved from the position he fell asleep in last night.

Not that he had been outrageously exhausted or anything; dinner had been a casual, happy thing, with Cody’s mother serving beautifully grilled fish, and successfully and kindly bullying him into drinking some local wine. He’d caught Cody’s eye, immediately propelled back to those nights in the Shatterdome mess hall, and smiled gratefully as his plate was heaped with homemade food. Rex and Boba, and yet another brother, Echo, had kept up conversation throughout the meal and into the night, an easy back-and-forth which Obi-Wan observed contentedly from his seat on the couch.

Cody had explained that his brother Kix lives in Christchurch proper, as a doctor, and that Fives is staying with him there for a little while. There had been a chord of guilty caution through the drift as Cody said this, and Obi-Wan had immediately changed the topic; is Boba the youngest, what university is Echo attending, will his cousins stay in Sydney after the Dome there shuts down?

Obi-Wan almost does fall back asleep, until a low hum of satisfaction blurs quietly through the connection. He shifts in place, rolling onto his back, and delves into the feeling of it in his mind, relishing the way it pillows around his mental touch. He can admit that it’s slightly strange to think about, but he tries not to question it. Now that they’ve been in the same vicinity as each other for a day or so the link has calmed down from its initial vibrancy, but it’s still so much more than he’s had for a long while. He imagines the clearing of a snowstorm, a staticky signal brightening to crisp sounds.

And when the drift pulls him into rising out of bed he does so, walking in his pyjamas to the door and opening it to find Cody already there. Obi-Wan slides his gaze down, nothing improper, just to the collar of his shirt and back up to Cody’s eyes, and there’s a moment again in which there is not necessarily a need to touch, but there is a sensation of wanting to sink further inwards, that’s echoed back and forth in the drift connection. Obi-Wan pictures placing a purely mental hand over it and feels his blush heat all the way down from cheeks to throat. He knows that Cody feels it too, confirmed both in the link and in the way Cody smiles, his eyes flickering to Obi-Wan’s mouth momentarily.

They’ve kissed before, heated even, with grasping hands and smooth fingers over sweaty skin, but—so it shouldn’t be this strange, to hover here in the doorway with his tongue behind his teeth, but—but. He lets out a breath of a laugh and retreats a half-step backwards into the guest room, and Cody rubs a hand over the back of his neck and says, sleep-rough, “Breakfast?”

The food continues to be delicious, and Obi-Wan can’t thank Cody’s mum, Kahurangi, effusively enough for her good work – lamb sausage and eggs and apple oatmeal, this morning – and then he and Rex and Cody are gearing up for a walk up the bridle path. Obi-Wan ties his boots snug while hunched on the front step of the house, and shifts wordlessly to the side just as Cody comes up behind him to pass through the doorway. They end up walking in sync to the road and the trail, and later, when Obi-Wan missteps on the incline, Cody is already there with a hand on his side to steady him.

***

_**January** _

Obi-Wan’s sleep has been better ever since he stopped setting an alarm. He still wakes up at the same time, but no longer has to suffer the split-second panic that comes from thinking the Kaiju siren is blaring, waking up too much all at once, filled with adrenaline. He’s practically retired now; he doesn’t need to start every day by jerking awake with gasping breaths and a racing heart. Cody had been the one to recommend it, just an unassuming suggestion with no expectations.

Despite this less contained sleep pattern, he finds himself having to blink away the fatigue when it rounds close to midnight. He’s parked in the lot of a nearby trailhead, and brought a thermos of tea with him to keep warm while the engine’s off, and just as he starts to think that the aurora won’t appear, it does. Just small wisps at first, and then the lights are fully curving, arching serenely across the sky, pale green-blue stripes twisting and shimmering above the snow-covered mountains. Obi-Wan watches them for a minute, up through the windshield of his car with a cup of tea slowly cooling in his hands, and then steps out.

It had been Anakin, surprisingly, who had asked for a picture of the lights. He’s doing well in Osaka apparently, blissfully cohabitating with Padmé, doing who knows what with his resumé of former Jaeger pilot and J-tech mechanic. Now that Obi-Wan is back in Alaska, though, Anakin has a tether to his first home again, and Obi-Wan thinks it’s pretty reasonable that if you grew up with something like the aurora hovering over you and the all the snow then you might want to get a more personal view of it again.

Obi-Wan had even found some of Anakin’s things, tucked into odd places around the house; mostly little mechanical contraptions left perched on bookshelves in the living room, but also a bright blue scarf hanging in the closet, and an old mp3-player in the guest room. Qui-Gon had welcomed him in like a second son, and likely would have even if they weren’t drift compatible, and Anakin had gladly and comfortably filled out all the empty spaces in his home.

He sends a picture of the lights to Cody as well, just because his name is at the top of his messages, and Obi-Wan thinks he’d appreciate it. He begins to type out something along the lines of how, in the privacy of his own mind, Obi-Wan imagines that this is what the drift connection looks like between them, flowing endlessly and beautifully from him to Cody and back. Spanning the entirety of the Pacific Ocean, with all its Kaiju polluted waters and the ragged gash in the ocean floor where the breach used to be, a wide and nebulous ribbon of colour that continuously shifts, settles, and shifts again, until—it fades, without preamble, without flourish or grandeur.

Obi-Wan resolutely avoids thinking about the connection fading. Instead, he pays bills on a house he inherited, and he goes to a different grocery store than before, and he slowly packs up his father’s room. He thinks about selling the house.

***

“There are so many different plants here,” Obi-Wan says, touching a frond of something that insists on hanging over his shoulder. “Compared to England. Compared to Alaska.”

Cody hums. “Compared to Tokyo?”

“When do you think I had time to see more of Tokyo than the immediate bay area?” Obi-Wan scoffs, but he imagines that Japan has some nice verdure.

A short breeze whips off the water up to where they sit together on a bench, but thankfully Obi-Wan has elected to wear a thicker coat today. A small group of ducks fly by, and he watches them until they dip back down to the water, hidden behind the body of a boat in the marina.

Cody tilts his head towards them. “And birds, too, we have those.” Obi-Wan takes a bite of his homemade pasty while he considers the veracity of this statement. It’s a little chilly, but so peaceful, and sitting on the right side of Cody lets the drift connection hum sweetly, all calm and pleasant like the water in front of them.

Obi-Wan opens his mouth to ask how many days are like this one in winter – and Cody angles towards him in instant anticipation of the question – when the tittering of a small group of people a little ways down the road snags his attention, pulling his words from him. Cody cautiously turns his head back in their direction to see what the distraction is, and then Obi-Wan can see him offer the group a small smile.

They must be out on their own walk around, backpacks clipped on securely, and when they pass by their bench the group chatters out many excited little ‘ _kia ora!_ ’-s, which Cody genially replies back to them. Obi-Wan holds his food close to his chest and stares a little wide-eyed at Cody for several seconds after the whole situation.

“Do you know them?” Obi-Wan asks. Maybe they’re from around here, and know Cody’s family.

Surprisingly, Cody says, “No, but,” and then he’s leaning forward, waggling an eyebrow in an attempt at lasciviousness in Obi-Wan’s direction. “I don’t know if you know this—I’m kind of a big deal.”

The waves lap quietly against the shore, the leaves of the bush behind Obi-Wan rustles in the breeze again, and then he and Cody burst out laughing. It bubbles up out of both of them, until Cody’s got one hand braced for dear life on his knee, one on the bench, and Obi-Wan is wiping a tear from his eye, because isn’t that just ridiculous? But Obi-Wan supposes it must be true, with a country as small as this one, and with a whole team of Maori Rangers, they must pretty much be national heroes.

As soon as they calm down a bit, Cody’s saying, “We’re not really bothered much by anyone. They just say hi and then we all go on with our days,” which makes sense, but in a distant, slightly unrecognizable sort of way. Obi-Wan can’t imagine that the American response would be so respectful. Thankfully he never really got recognized, at least not for his part in the final Kaiju attack, but for some time after there had been news reports, and pictures and articles and blog posts and tweets by journalists, fans, regular folk, all about the two different Tai Mate teams, and about the basement-Jaeger – never named, may she rest in peace, as Anakin had said at an impromptu funeral during the Tokyo Dome shutdown party. If Obi-Wan had been more of a public figure he’s not sure he would have survived the six months between then and now.

Cody puts his arm coolly over the back of the bench, and Obi-Wan leans his shoulder into it before really thinking about it. A realisation blooms, then, that he would perhaps like to not have to think about it, even if they didn’t have a drift that seems to predict and account for and accommodate every move they make towards each other.

Cody’s fingers linger close to Obi-Wan’s shoulder, so he swallows down his initial hesitation and says, “I’ve never really had time for relationships before.” Obi-Wan’s voice comes out almost too quietly, and he restrains himself from looking down the road to where they last saw other people. “I’m in my mid-thirties, I’m tired, and I’ve always been working,” he says. Cody listens patiently, and Obi-Wan senses how he tilts his head to hear him better.

“I think about you all the time, now, but—” his voice stops up in his throat as it tightens, his face heating suddenly. He pushes on, “But I’m not sure, how much of that thinking about you is from the drift, _our_ drift, and how much is just. Me. Just myself, my own brain.” He lets out a breath, and Cody’s fingers finally land on his far shoulder.

“Maybe the drift _is_ you,” Cody says softly.

Obi-Wan raises his gaze enough to just see the bottom half of Cody’s face, the line of his lips, the jut of his chin. “I thought the drift was supposed to be _us_ ,” he counters, but in the moment it feels like he’s maybe answering his own question.

Cody shrugs, as if to express that there’s no real difference, and Obi-Wan has to look away, at the water lapping around the dock poles. After a moment, Cody slowly ducks his head, his cheek coming to rest near the round of Obi-Wan’s near shoulder. He feels enveloped.

“I think about you all the time, too,” he whispers, a flutter of breath across Obi-Wan’s coat, a hum across the drift between them.

***

_**February** _

He’s not entirely sure where he would go, but Obi-Wan thinks about moving. He’s never been especially attached to this house, and none of the stuff inside of it is anything he particularly wants to keep, besides those photograph albums, and some of Anakin’s leftover belongings.

This all comes up in a call to Cody one night. Obi-Wan’s arm had seized for the first time in months, after he’d thought that maybe that tangled leftover of his botched first drift had been somehow overwritten by the healthy one he shares—shared? shares—with Cody, and he’d sent the video call invite basically on accident as he’d fumbled with his phone. Cody had picked up while Obi-Wan was washing the nosebleed off his face, had called out a faint “Obi-Wan?” through the phone’s tinny speakers, had admirably held in his laughter when Obi-Wan, lip still half-bloody, reappeared in view.

After a minute of brief apologies, Cody’s remedy to Obi-Wan’s location dilemma is to semi-jokingly suggest moving to New Zealand. Obi-Wan lets him laugh it off, but ever since that first day after, the one where they were no longer living in a world with the threat of Kaiju, he’s been thinking about Cody’s invitation. Of course he’d had responsibilities to take care of in Alaska, and couldn’t even allow himself to indulge in a trip away from the Pacific like he’d initially fantasised. But, in the most quiescent, idle way, he thinks sometimes about his meagre leftover PPDC pay, combined with whatever he could get for the house. He thinks about the fact that he wouldn’t have to move many belongings with him, and then he’d be closer to Cody, in the same city, perhaps, and then—

Then he wouldn’t have to worry so much about the seemingly ever-shrinking tendrils of the drift he finds himself anxiously checking all the time. Sure, that one study from seven years ago mentioned the persistence of drift connection between pilots, but their sample size and general methods had left a lot to be questioned. What if pilots have only ever drifted once? What if the pilots don’t stay in the same barracks afterwards? What if the pilots live longer than those Rangers in the study, who died in a mission only 4 months after the paper was published?

When he’s at his most tired and susceptible, Obi-Wan likens the feeling of the connection to the fraying ends of a woven cloth, unravelling on it own, ever more with each passing mental touch that Obi-Wan takes, helpless to stop either it or himself, and—he blurts out, in the middle of something Cody’s saying about the Kaiju organ black market, “Will it disappear?”

Cody cuts off his own sentence, re-calibrates. “What? The organs?”

“The drift,” Obi-Wan says, and then it’s spilling out of him. “If we stay so far apart for so long a time, or even if we’re, well, _not_ far apart, will it just—?” The words get tangled up in his throat.

Cody looks away for a second, off to the side of the screen, and it feels so long and so still that Obi-Wan thinks maybe the video is frozen, until Cody says, quietly, “I don’t know.”

Obi-Wan swallows. “There are those research studies, but, you know,” he says, not needing to finish the sentence, and Cody’s nodding.

“Yeah,” he agrees. He looks back at the screen, at Obi-Wan, and says, “But it’s okay, right? Isn’t our—isn’t what we have more than just that one time we drifted?”

This isn’t necessarily calming, but it is the truth. Obi-Wan covers whatever embarrassing, agonized face he might be making with a sip of water, leaning far enough to the side that he knows he’s off-screen for a second. “Yes,” he says, once recovered, and he smiles, and takes a deep breath in through his nose, and he asks Cody what he was saying about organs.

***

Usually – which means, every time in the past nine years – Obi-Wan can get away with introducing himself within the context of his work at whichever Dome he was currently at. “Hello, I’m the Mission Controller here,” or “General Kenobi, of the Tokyo Shatterdome” sufficed because they were true, and because he never really had to meet people outside of his work anyways.

To say that he’s struggling with his own introductions now that he’s no longer attached to a rank or occupation would be an overstatement, but not completely untrue.

“And who’re you?” One of Cody’s cousins, or maybe just a family friend, slaps an amiable hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. He’s been feeling sparks all night in the back of his brain, which hasn’t exactly been conducive to making good impressions on Cody’s family. His outrageously large family.

“Obi-Wan,” he says. “I’m—a friend of Cody’s,” he tries to clarify, with a strange little stilted shrug, a mostly full beer bottle in one hand.

Thankfully, this seems to be sufficient. Fives even comes to his aid, saying, “Bro, he’s the one who blew up the Kaiju! The disrespect,” which sets off the rest of them around this corner of the back deck area. Obi-Wan would try to keep up with the conversation, but between all the in-jokes and the very distracting prickles in his mind right now, he ends up propped against one of the deck railings with the rim of the beer bottle just resting on his lip. His gaze drifts across the yard, to where Cody’s got a paper plate of food in one hand and his other arm at the back of an elderly woman with _moko_ on her chin, helping her to one of the deck chairs. She swats at his hand but takes the plate, and when Cody straightens again he catches Obi-Wan’s eye. The sparking drift recedes like a tide.

“Obi-Wan?” He turns to find Kahurangi at his side, smiling like she knows everything in his brain. Obi-Wan is only a little intimidated, and when she asks for his help inside he gladly gives it, patting Fives on the back as he passes through the group of cousins.

She points him to a glass-front cabinet in the living room. Its middle shelves are filled with family heirlooms and delicate figurines, but it’s the topmost shelf of glassware that is the subject of her interest.

“You’re big and tall. I need two of those glasses,” she commands, finger hovering just underneath a set of crystal wineglasses, each cup inlaid with silver in the shape of a fern. She takes his beer bottle from him and leans around the nearest doorway to abandon it on the kitchen counter.

“They’re beautiful,” Obi-Wan says, dutifully opening the cabinet and carefully handing them down to her. The silver flashes in the light under his fingers, like some of the abalone shell artwork he’s seen in Alaska.

“They were a gift from my husband,” Kahurangi says. “And they’re the only thing grandma Tahu will drink out of,” she adds, a little exasperated, but then with a wry little smirk appears on her face. “Cody almost smashed all of them when he was about . . . eleven? I think? Nearly gave us a heart attack.” She laughs, then waves a hand at the shelf again. “Get one for yourself, too.” He does so.

“How did Cody manage that?” Obi-Wan asks, following her into the kitchen where a small assortment of wines are out on the counter.

“Oh, that fool,” she says with a warm expression. “We’d brought the box of them over to the _marae_ for a friend’s wedding, and when we were packing up he insisted he was big enough to help carry things.” She uncorks a bottle of red and starts pouring into all three glasses. “He ended up on the beach with them, but it’s so pebbly, of course he trips.”

“A pebbly beach is the downfall of many men,” Obi-Wan says soberly. He tries to imagine Cody as a boy, all skinny limbs and chubby cheeks. It’s not hard.

“Funny thing, though,” she says, and makes a small gesture towards one of the glasses. Obi-Wan takes it, and waits for her to pick up her own before taking a sip. “Just as I saw him start to go down, he does a twist, like this,” and Kahurangi pivots her torso around, hands in front like she’s carrying something. “So he ends up flat on his back, arms in the air, holding the box upright above him! Not a scratch!” She makes a show of inspecting her pristine glass.

“Ouch,” Obi-Wan says, though, because that could not have been a particularly soft landing, and Kahurangi laughs, waves them back out to the yard.

“Ahh, he turned out fine,” she says, coming up to where Cody is still standing next to the elderly woman Obi-Wan assumes must be grandma Tahu. “Didn’t you?” she asks her son, handing over the third wineglass.

Cody must’ve heard at least the last part of the conversation, or he’s able to infer what they’re talking about from context, so he says, “Pretty sure I did something awful to my tailbone doing that.” He smiles at Obi-Wan, though, so it must not have been too traumatic.

“Bones heal,” Grandma Tahu pipes up dismissively from her chair, and Kahurangi nods in solemn agreement as she perches on the seat beside. That’s that.

They get food, then, Cody leading him over to the folding table with trays of pork and lamb, delicious sweet potato and greens. Cody puts a piece of eel on Obi-Wan’s plate even though he’d initially turned his nose up at it, and waits patiently until Obi-Wan tastes it begrudgingly. They all settle in a sprawl on the lawn, until it gets dark, and then they’re lighting candles and one cousin is bringing out chocolates, sure to give the ladies of the family first choice before Cody’s male relatives swarm in. After a slight commotion, Cody brings one over to Obi-Wan, and then the immediate gathering around them devolves into a loud, disjointed discussion of manuka honey and its place in other sweets.

By the end of the night, Obi-Wan ends up inside, collapsed in an armchair with his second glass of wine, eyes drifting shut. He thinks maybe people are finally making their way back to their homes, but it’s hard to tell as he dozes, barely awake. Like a silhouette, or an outline in his mind’s eye, he’s able to pick out Cody as he walks slowly around the house, sending family members off with leftover food. Obi-Wan is content not to question how he knows this, or whether he’s just dreaming; it’s too tiring to think about the logical limits of a vestigial drift connection right now.

Without thinking, he sends a little wave along the link, as if smoothing over it with a fingertip. He watches, in the same strange way as before, as Cody feels it instantaneously and pauses in his current motion, turning in toward the house. Obi-Wan’s eyes are still closed but he can sense it when Cody enters the room. The staticky feeling of the drift smooths down as Cody walks slowly forward, a sort of shiver passing back through their link, and then Cody’s lips press gently to his forehead, soft and warm. The wine glass gets pulled from his hand to be placed on the table, but – Obi-Wan lying in a med-centre bed, Cody taking the cup of water from him as he falls asleep – but Obi-Wan doesn’t want to fall asleep this time.

He catches Cody’s hand, clinging to his fingers. Creaking his eyes open reveals Cody, half-bent in the action of setting the glass down, eyeing him questioningly. With a small tug, Cody comes to perch on the arm of the chair, and, with his hand still returning Obi-Wan’s grip, he whispers, “Not going anywhere, Obi-Wan,” and oh, how he loves hearing Cody say his name.

***

_**March** _

Obi-Wan has just responded to an email from Ahsoka about writing a reference letter for a scholarship – of course he’ll do it, any chance to sing her praises – when he gets the request for a video call. He even thinks it’s from Anakin, at first, because he’d stood Obi-Wan up for their scheduled call last night, but when he checks his laptop, it’s from Cody.

This in and of itself is not strange. As much as that first time had been an accident, they’ve been calling each other a fair amount; not really on a schedule, like with Anakin, but neither of them are particularly busy, and it’s nice to hear Cody’s voice and see his face instead of just reading text.

Obi-Wan picks up the call through his computer, and after the first couple seconds of connecting the call and re-orienting Cody’s phone, he props it up against something and backs away to reveal that he’s—dressed in a very nice suit. Obi-Wan’s breath catches, and he covers it in a clearing of his throat.

“Do you have time?” Cody asks, but before Obi-Wan can answer, he explains, “My cousin’s getting married—did I tell you about Fox’s wedding already?”

Obi-Wan keeps his eyes on Cody’s face like a gentleman. “You did. You look nice,” he says, and it comes out easier than expected.

“Oh, good, that’s great,” Cody says in a breath of relief. He messes with the collar and lapels and tie all at once. “Okay. It really doesn’t look weird? I just—don’t wear suits.”

Obi-Wan gives him a reassuring smile. “No one could tell you’re not a natural,” he says, and good, Cody’s got that little uptick of a smile again.

“I’ll have to do a haka in this too, so,” he starts, and then abruptly does a couple of deep squats, which the angle of his phone fortunately captures in the video call.

Obi-Wan forgets his genteel act and zeroes in on the shape of Cody’s thighs straining through the suit material. Several memories of watching him spar in the Dome resurface all at once. It’ll be summer in New Zealand still, so he imagines the evening look will be even better when the jacket’s off—"forearms bare, with the sleeves rolled up.”

Obi-Wan watches, slightly mortified, as Cody pauses in tugging his cuffs straight. He feels his own blush creep up his face. “Sorry, what was that?” Cody asks, coming back toward his phone.

Obi-Wan clears his throat again, looks around his living room for the mug of tea he left somewhere. “Nothing,” he says, very unconvincingly.

Cody smirks into the camera like a man simultaneously caught a little off-guard, but also proven wrong in thinking he’d be the one to be embarrassed on this call. “Pretty sure you said something about—? Huh? Forearms, maybe?”

“Of course not,” Obi-Wan says, but because he’s already in a losing battle, “I mean—well, doesn’t everyone—and your hands are—”

“What’s this about my hands?” Cody leans in and leers at the camera. “Sorry, it’s the connection on this call, I’m not sure I’m hearing you right,” he teases, except Obi-Wan very much wants to be swallowed up by his couch right about now.

Cody stays smirking for a little longer and then it softens, his beautiful brown eyes flicking around like he’s looking at different parts of his phone screen. “I have to get to that wedding,” Cody says, then, saving him. Or, at least until he adds, “but if you want me to call later, maybe when I’ve taken my jacket off, rolled up my sleeves . . . ?”

Obi-Wan finally summons the wherewithal to feign indifference. “Sure, although I may not have the time, there’s a lot of things on my schedule, you see.”

“Uh huh,” Cody says, not convinced in the least.

***

It’s late enough that Obi-Wan doesn’t have to check the clock on the bedside to tell that the rest of the house is firmly asleep. He’s tired from another day of walking around Christchurch proper with Cody and Fives, but apparently not tired enough. Instead of dozing off to the pleasant memory of the natural history museum and the botanic gardens, he keeps circling back to what he’s meant to be doing with his life, except with each repetition of the thought he becomes increasingly exasperated. He knows he wants to leave Alaska but he’s not sure where he would go, and even though Cody – because every time, he comes back to thinking about Cody – would tell him to just come to New Zealand, Obi-Wan can’t just move into Kahurangi’s house. He’s in his mid-thirties, he’s expected to have a place of his own, he’s expected to know what to do, where to go, how to be, and all he is right now is very much still awake.

The drift is buzzing in the back of his skull too, so he gives up and just listens to it, throwing the bedcovers off of himself. There’s a slight chill in the air that spurs him on faster, following the pull of the drift to the door, to open it and look down the hallway, take a step further, stare at the door of Cody’s room until Obi-Wan sees him emerge from it in the same way. He can almost feel his heartbeat quicken at the same time his feet do. The drift urges them along to each other, pushing, beseeching, and Obi-Wan’s hands come up on either side of Cody’s face, their noses barely a couple inches away.

An aching, crushing force of a moment passes, in which Obi-Wan can almost feel himself mirrored there in front of him; the soft grey-blue light like dove feathers across Cody’s face, eyes open and stunning, lips parted. Stubble rasps under Obi-Wan’s fingertips. A sway appears in their combined momentum, and then his lips are on Cody, landing on his jaw at first, and then the corner of his mouth, before Cody sighs into their proper kiss. A surge through the back of Obi-Wan’s mind is echoed all over his body, pushing him into Cody’s space further still, his hands clasping at Cody’s neck, his bare shoulders, the firm muscles and velvet skin of his sides, just as he feels hands smooth over him in the same places, fingers tangling. Obi-Wan can only clench his eyes shut and press into Cody’s mouth over and over, each lick over his lips echoed back with a sensation that feels so _right_.

The sound of their breathing is almost stiflingly loud for just this small hallway, so Cody walks them back towards his room. He closes the door with a hush, and Obi-Wan could be led absolutely anywhere with just Cody’s hands on his hips like this. At the thought, Cody breaks away to gasp out, “Obi-Wan,” his fingers dipping underneath the hem of Obi-Wan’s t-shirt.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Obi-Wan says, like an explanation matters at this moment, when he has Cody’s chest to touch in front of him, when Cody’s trying to shuck Obi-Wan’s shirt up enough to brush over the trail of hair above the waistband of his pyjama bottoms.

“Mmm,” Cody hums, like an agreement and encouragement in one, as he sits down on the end of his bed, corralling Obi-Wan in by a hand around his waist, fingers at the small of his back. The buzz in the back of Obi-Wan’s head is all-consuming, propelling each movement like he’s back in the Jaeger, almost. He puts a knee on the bed beside Cody’s hip.

“Cody,” he sighs out, hands cupping Cody’s neck to keep them from trembling too much. He feels on a precipice already, rocking his hips forward into Cody’s stomach to get some relief, but the echo through the drift just surges more through him. He feels like he’s been waiting for this for a lifetime already.

One of Cody’s hands smooths down the line of Obi-Wan’s back, kisses him again as distraction, and grabs his ass to yank him forward more firmly into his lap. Obi-Wan could tell that’s where he was going with his movements but lets out a little gasp regardless, and helplessly tips his head back at the press of their groins together. He’s overheated already, and sure, Cody’s kisses on his neck don’t do anything to alleviate it, but Obi-Wan has the indistinct feeling that there’s a base sensation of togetherness supplied by the drift that is the root of all this. How enormous every breath feels, punched out of him with every stroke of a hand along his skin, every rock of their hips together.

He bites down on a moan; he shouldn’t make so much noise. “I just want—” he rasps, but can’t finish it, the words stopping up in his throat.

Cody seems to get it, though, pulling back just enough to hitch them both further up onto the bed, and finally laying all the way down. Obi-Wan exhales at the loss of Cody’s hands on his hips but can’t regret it when it gives him the sight of Cody’s big arms above his head, the skin of his triceps so soft and inviting where they curve above his armpit. They never bothered with the lights, they’re still just going by the moonlight where it shines in through Cody’s window; Obi-Wan wonders how pale he must look in it.

He shoves that thought to the side and leans forward to put his mouth on the meat of Cody’s breast, to feel the smattering of hair there. He hears Cody say ‘ _yes_ ,’ or maybe he just gasps the breath of the word, but Obi-Wan feels it nonetheless, and he moans into it when he sucks Cody’s nipple between tongue and lip, and Cody’s hand comes down to run his fingers through Obi-Wan’s hair.

When he dares a look upwards he sees Cody’s head thrown back, his other hand clutching at the sheet and it sends such a thrill through him that he reaches back to shove down his own pants. They have no reason to be in a rush, just like they had no idea of rushing the last six months apart but it seemed to happen anyways, and so if Obi-Wan feels a little frantic as he helps Cody shed his pants too, then that’s just par for the course at this point. Hooray for consistency.

He laughs into their next kiss but knows he doesn’t have to explain it. It’s heavenly when he settles back down in Cody’s lap, and Cody’s hand comes to wrap around both of their cocks together, heavy and firm, a jolt of bliss sparking up Obi-Wan’s spine. He wants to do so much in this one instant, but it’s all he can manage to just breath raggedly into Cody’s mouth, unable to focus on more than one thing at a time—the way Cody brushes his thumb over his slit on the upstroke, the way Obi-Wan clutches at the skin of Cody’s belly that will surely leave half-moon nail imprints, the way Cody’s breath whines out of his mouth a little, so much more high-pitched than Obi-Wan could have expected. The way his own stomach clenches up as he imagines getting to do this _again_ , and oh, god, the heat of them both at every point where they touch, _fuck_ , the shockingly gentle brush of Cody’s lips at Obi-Wan’s hairline, until he’s coming, stumbling into it with a groan shocked out of his chest.

The way Cody grips them both together means he can feel the pulse of his own cock like a double sensation, and once Obi-Wan finds a way to process _that_ , he’s reaching down, saying, “Come on, come on, I have you,” into the space under Cody’s chin, and he feels the sudden jolt-freeze of Cody’s orgasm underneath his hands.

Cody pants out a noise like a structural collapse and then Obi-Wan is careening off to the side, relishing the brief moment of post-orgasmic looseness before his knees start to complain about having just had to vigorously straddle someone. Their hands come together again though, seemingly of their own volition, and as Obi-Wan tries to catch his breath, he sends a grateful little notion to whichever part of the universe decided that their hands could be the most reliable.

***

_**April** _

Winter finally seems to close out in Anchorage, and spring comes in earnest. Of course, this only means that it finally gets to about a couple degrees above freezing at midday, and the sky stays blue enough to match the slowly melting water as it flows down each slope it can find, out along the inlet. Seabirds start to flock back to the harbour, and little tree birds flit around the big fir tree by his house like they’re competing to cause as much of a ruckus as possible.

Obi-Wan goes on a hike, a slightly chilly one that means there won’t be too many tourists out and about. The solitude sends him back to the hikes he took when he was younger, not just around these familiar mountain paths but the ones around Devon too, the flat marshy boardwalks in Dartmoor nothing like the rocky paths here but still the same thousand shades of green and brown and grey.

He steps carefully over a tree root and pauses to look up, hand shielding the sun from his eyes, the tips of the trees swaying and circling in the strong higher breeze. How often had he just been alone with himself while Qui-Gon worked after they moved here, he wonders. To him, all these hikes had melded into one in his memory, just a single walk along a winding path through all the seasons, through snow and sun and rain. Oh, how he’d leapt at the chance to be in the same place as his father again, to work at the Dome and dutifully climb the ranks to be mission controller. What had really been driving him back then?

Obi-Wan hikes until he finds a small vista, one with a trail marker, and which overlooks a little clearing nestled into the hills, still dusty with snow. Something catches his eye, high above, and when he spots it coming out of the brightness of the sun he sees the huge, gliding wings, soaring calmly over everything in wide, serene loops. After a small moment, in which Obi-Wan just breathes in the new-green smell of the conifers and watches the eagle, he pulls out his phone to take a picture of it, just a dark speck against blue, the tops of the trees peaking into view at the edges of the photo.

The picture gets sent to Anakin and Ahsoka and Cody, who each manage to have (probably) unwittingly coordinated their responses to parallel the thought, “You’re really trying to tell me that tiny smudge is America’s bird of freedom?” Obi-Wan can’t help but smile and tuck his phone away again, finishing his walk with a lightness in his chest.

Obi-Wan also finally lets himself consider visiting New Zealand. Not moving there, just visiting—he can’t think that solidly just yet. He’s spent so much of the last nine years planning everything to the minute that now he’s out of it he almost balks at the commitment. He does want to see Cody, though. He wants to feel the drift in the back of his skull at full force again, make sure it hasn’t really left, but—even if it has, he wants to see him. Obi-Wan can admit that much to himself, now.

***

The next morning, Cody is clean shaven and Obi-Wan has gotten at least a minimal amount of sleep. The sunlight shining outside the window looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day.

“Does this mean I need to go up to Alaska now?” Cody asks. They’re sitting too close on the couch for any kind of excuse to be believed, but Obi-Wan thinks that probably doesn’t matter anymore. Their knees are touching, and every time Cody lifts his arm to bring his mug up to his mouth, his elbow hovers very close to Obi-Wan’s chest.

Obi-Wan twists his mouth, taking a considering look at the side of Cody’s face. “No, I don’t think so,” he concludes. “You’ve already got mountains here. And plenty of ocean.”

“Okay, great.” Cody almost looks a little relieved at that, and Obi-Wan tries not to take it as an insult on behalf of the state of Alaska. He rolls his eyes at him instead.

“I would accuse you of loving your country too much, but I can see the appeal now, I think,” Obi-Wan says. Cody turns his head to look at him all smug, with eyelids lowered salaciously, and it would rile Obi-Wan up if he couldn’t see the smear of toothpaste dried on Cody’s chin, or hear Rex humming along to the radio in the kitchen.

Cody dips his head to press his lips to Obi-Wan’s shoulder. The drift is a low, steady sigh right now, both of them ever on the same wavelength, content to remain beside each other for a while yet.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr @brigitttt (personal) and/or @brigittttoo (side with writing), and on twitter @brigitttt_ .


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